


Twenty Love Poems (and a Song of Despair)

by 70sBabe



Category: Gilmore Girls
Genre: Angst, F/M, Jess POV, Unresolved Ending, follows canon even though i hate some of the canon, not my usual fix-it fic, these poems fit them so well
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-24
Updated: 2019-04-24
Packaged: 2020-01-31 08:38:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18587686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/70sBabe/pseuds/70sBabe
Summary: Jess' thoughts and feelings about Rory, told through "20 Love Poems (and a Song of Despair)" by Pablo Neruda





	Twenty Love Poems (and a Song of Despair)

**i. Body of a Woman**

 

_To survive myself I forged you like a weapon,_

_like an arrow in my bow, a stone in my sling_

 

It’s easier to dislike her. Easier to find her enthusiasm irritating, her laugh grating, her smile painful. It’s easier to make her into something she’s not.

Jess knows what it’s like to be let down. As a child, he had expectations for people in his life: his mother, his teachers, the guy at the 7-11 on the corner. He soon learned that no one has to be what you need them to be.

But not her.

Rory is exactly what he needs her to be, which is dangerous because, sooner or later, she won’t be. She will let him down. She already does sometimes, whenever she looks at him like he isn’t enough. He knows he’s not; why does she have to keep reminding him?

So he makes her into a weapon. He imagines her slight disapproval into a deep-rooted hatred of him and all he stands for. He tells himself she’s a dork, a geek, a teacher’s pet. He looks at her boyfriend and thinks, “ _How could any self-respecting person choose him? She can’t be who I thought she was_.” He twists her image until it’s unrecognizable. He makes her into something she’s not.

Because this is how he will survive. By pretending she has already let him down, already shown him that she isn’t what he needs. This is how he will survive her. This is how he will survive himself.

 

**ii. The Light Wraps You**

 

_The great roots of night_

_grow suddenly from your soul,_

_and the things that hide in you come out again_

 

She’s different once the sun goes down. He likes to think that she’s more free, more uninhibited, more herself. He likes to think that because that’s when he usually spends time with her.

She wanders into the diner, jonesing for one last cup of coffee before bed and a side of fries with that, please. She always says please, even though she has to know he’d probably eat glass for her. Well, okay, maybe not glass. How about dirt? He’d eat dirt for her.

She keeps things hidden; from her mother, from her friends, from her boyfriend, from herself. Jess sees these things, knows them, and waits patiently for the sun to go down and for those things to emerge.

“I think - “

“I know.”

“I wish - “

“Me, too.”

“How - “

“I just do.”

Everything flows, from him to her and vice versa. They are the same, but different enough to keep things interesting, and he has given up on making her into a weapon of Jess-destruction.

He likes knowing that he’s the only one who sees her like this, elbows up on the counter that he has been pretending to wipe down for the last 30 minutes, eyes cloudy with uncertainty about a future that everyone else has already committed to memory. She is unsure, just like him, but he knows that as soon as day breaks, she will snap back. She’ll be the same Rory everyone knows and loves, the one who speaks her achievements and accolades into existence, the one who spackles over any cracks in the Gilmore facade before they can be noticed.

He harbors a bit of resentment for this Rory. He prefers the Rory whose soul belongs to the night, to uncertainty. To Jess.

 

**iii. Ah Vastness of Pines**

 

_In you the rivers sing and my soul flees in them_

_as you desire, and you send it where you will_

 

He follows her like a lost puppy, like a devoted cult member, like a Deadhead. He pretends that he’d never jump through hoops for her but, one look, and he’s already balancing a ball on his nose. They should take their act on the road: Rory, the Blue-Eyed Beauty and Jess, the Amazing Trained Seal. If he and her mother were on better terms, he knows she’d laugh at that. As it is now, she would maybe force out a “ha!” and then roll her eyes when she thinks he’s not looking.

Rory acts like she doesn’t know she’s doing it, but she has to know. Her last boyfriend heard the same siren song she keeps on repeat and, if Jess was the type, he might have even commiserated with Dean. They have both known the pleasure and the pain of loving a Gilmore Girl.

Where she leads, he follows. Isn’t that what that old song said? He heard her singing it one day under her breath as she arranged tater tots on a baking sheet, preparing for a Dirty Harry marathon. He bought a _Tapestry_ CD the next day. He keeps it hidden under his mattress because can you _imagine_ what Luke would say?

He thinks maybe this is what love is, but he’s not sure, The books were always a little vague and that’s what he bases most experiences on. He prefers not to refer to the movies or songs. They always hit on the good stuff, but never on the bad. And there is plenty of bad.

But not right now. Right now, it is as easy as the flow of a river. It’s easy to follow her. Too easy. But he’s not going to think about that now. Not yet.

 

**iv. The Morning Is Full**

 

_The numberless heart of the wind_

_beating above our loving silence_

 

He likes silence. Silence means he can hear himself think. Silence means he can hear the words that his books whisper to him, the ones that float between the lines and around the edges of the page. Silence means he doesn’t have to try to be anything but himself.

He likes it when she is silent with him. They sit, side by side, warm where their arms touch and Jess hears more in her silence than he hears in her words.

The turning of a page: I am both beside you and far away. I am sitting on Luke’s old couch and walking through a Swiss garden with Winterbourne and Daisy Miller. I am comfortable enough to fully fall into another world in front of you.

Shifting in her seat: I am at ease, but would be more so if you put your arm around me.

Her lips meeting his: I want you and I want you right now. Daisy Miller can wait, and so can your visit with Yossarian.

An exhalation of breath: I am here. I am with you. That is all.

Jess likes silence because, in her silence, Jess can hear her say “I love you.”

 

**v. So That You Will Hear Me**

 

_And I watch my words from a long way off._

_They are more yours than mine._

 

He is not himself these days. Or maybe he’s more himself than he’s ever been, more himself than he’d like to admit. A chilling thought.

He says things that cut her, that anger her, that cause her to go home and curl up on her bed and dwell on things. He doesn’t mean them. Or maybe he does. He can’t tell.

It’s like he’s watching from a million miles away, like he has no control over this Jess, the one who’s here on Earth, wreaking havoc and smashing everything in sight.

And, in a way, this is the person everyone - including her - expected him to become. She put up a good front, defending him to her mother, her friends, the entire town, but you can only fight for so long. She’s tired, he can see that, and he’s tired, too.

The words he finds himself spitting out don’t belong to him, not really. They belong to everyone else and, as time goes on, they belong to her. When she refuses to believe he didn’t get into a fight with Dean. When she insists on having this fight at her grandparents’ house, of all places, with her grandmother in the next room. When she watches him go, sees the duffel bag on the seat next to him, and all she says is, “You’ll call me?”

It’s all a cruel joke, isn’t it? Because, in the pursuit of becoming a person Rory would be proud to be seen with, in the pursuit of proving everyone wrong, he has become exactly the monster they all thought he was.

Irony, you cruel son of a bitch.

 

**vi. I Remember You As You Were**

 

_I remember you as you were in the last autumn_

 

That’s all he can think as he looks at her now: I remember a different you, a you with longer hair and more sensible shoes and a smile on your face when you saw me.

But now her hair is short and her shoes look uncomfortable (especially with the amount of running she just did) and her face is blank. Impassive. It’s somehow worse than the anger he had been expecting, because at least anger is an emotion, but this emptiness on her face scares him.

She yells, sure, and her words are full of venom and vitriol, but her eyes remain vacant and he wonders how everything between them went so wrong that she doesn’t even look like herself anymore.

So he sees as her as she was instead. He sees a girl with a smile on her face and a sparkle in her eyes, a girl with a book in one hand and the whole world resting in the palm of the other. He sees the girl from last autumn, the girl in a bright red coat and an armful of sunflowers who dragged him into an alley for a kiss.

He knows it’s wrong to keep her locked in the past, to resent the fact that she’s changed just because he wasn’t around to see it, but it’s the only thing keeping him sane.

It’s the only thing keeping him from being completely destroyed by the deafening silence that hangs over the both of them after he sighs, “I love you.” Funny how he used to love her silence. Now he’d give anything for some classic Gilmore motor-mouthing.

He leaves. It’s what he’s good at. He knows he’ll do his best to block this out, to erase this new version of Rory, because it hurts too much, God, it _hurts too much_.

So he’ll remember her as she was when she still loved him.

 

**vii. Leaning Into The Afternoons**

 

_Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad nets_

_towards your oceanic eyes_

 

Before California, he’d never cared about the ocean. It was just that big mass of grey-brown water that churned and splashed and encircled New York City.

He came to appreciate the ocean at Venice Beach, though, maybe even like it. The constant movement. The reassuring roar. The smell of salt. It was something he never really saw coming, but ended up loving, either way.

Just like Rory.

After the last time he saw her, after he had offered his love and she had looked at him like he was a stranger, he made his way back to New York. He needed something familiar, at least for a little while.

And, loathe as he was to admit it, the ocean was familiar. He finds himself in East River Park and, yeah, technically the water in front of him was a river and not the ocean, but Manhattan is a damn island! It’s all going to the same place, anyways, so Jess closes his eyes and feels the breeze on his face and feels his heartbeat slow down from the “Stayin’ Alive” rhythm it had been banging out for the last three months.

It’s stupid, but the water reminds him of Rory’s eyes. Such a cliche and the water here is nowhere near the crystal-clear blue of her eyes, but he can’t stop himself from finding her in every aspect of his life.

He rereads _The Old Man and the Sea_ and thinks about how simple life would be as a fisherman: just go out in your boat, cast a net, and wait for the fish to come to you. It sounded nice. Quiet. Solitary.

He rereads some of her favorites, too; his feeble attempt at making amends, even though she doesn’t know where he is or what he’s doing and doesn’t want to know.

 _Anna Karenina_ makes him sad, _The Fountainhead_ makes him want to tear his hair out, and _Persuasion_ gives him that most dangerous gift: hope.

In a way, he is casting nets of his own, nets that will bring him nothing but disappointment, but hey: he has to try.

 

**viii. White Bee**

 

_I am the one without hope, the world without echoes,_

_he who lost everything and he who had everything_

 

He thought that time would banish her from his memory. He thought that there was no way her face could plague him for the rest of his life. He thought wrong.

He moves around a lot. Splitting for California gave him an incurable case of wanderlust that he can indulge now that there’s nothing and no one counting on him. He leaves New York after a few months and heads south for no particular reason.

He hits Philly, DC, Nashville, and Atlanta before making it to Palm Beach. He would’ve kept driving if there wasn’t nothing but ocean ahead of him. He goes back to New York.

A few months later, he tries going west, but gets sick of the empty flatlands and turns around after spending a weekend in Chicago.

He’d never say it out loud, but he’s searching for something with these road trips. He’s searching for a place that doesn’t make him feel completely hopeless about the prospect of building a new life for himself. High school dropouts don’t exactly have the world at their feet, you know what I mean?

It’s all too tragic for words, though, because everywhere he goes, he sees Rory walking the same streets and making a home for herself there. A park on the outskirts of Philly, a bookstore in DC, a pizza place in Chicago; hell, even hanging with the crazy beach bums in Florida.

He realizes one day that losing Rory had meant more than just a broken heart. It meant losing a future that he had thought was assured. It meant losing everything he had planned on.

 It meant losing the things he had fooled himself into believing belonged to him.

 

**ix. Drunk With Pines**

 

_Hardened by passions, I go mounted on my one wave,_

_lunar, solar, burning and cold, all at once_

 

Once again, Stars Hollow’s siren song calls him back to a place that he’s stopped referring to as hell (he upgraded it to purgatory after spending a few months in a particularly crappy apartment in the Bronx that showed him what true hell was). This time, it’s not about Rory. Cue the surprised gasp from the audience.

He goes because Luke asked him to and Luke never asked much from him. That never stopped Jess from letting him down, but this time, it felt different. This time, Jess was looking for a way out of the period of emptiness he had stumbled into. He let his hair grow long, spent too much time indoors, giving him a paler face than usual, and he just….was. He didn’t watch TV, didn’t go out to bars, he was barely reading. Call it a state of suspended animation. So when Luke offered an escape, albeit a brief one, Jess jumped at the chance. Of course, he pretended reluctance and arm-twisting, just for old time’s sake.   

He rides towards Connecticut on a wave of anger, sadness, joy, apathy; pretty much any emotion you could name, all canceling each other out to leave him with a general feeling of “meh.” Better than some alternatives, so he doesn’t see the point in complaining.

In a way, going back to Stars Hollow is good for him. He rediscovers the old mischievous streak that brought him so much grief from others but so much pleasure from himself. He remembers what it feels like to brace himself for his mother’s touch, how to grimace when she expects a smile from him. He even digs up a little anger for Luke, though he knows he’s projecting his own disappointments about how everything’s turned out onto the wrong person.

So when he’s presented with a handbook on how to win someone’s love and affections, he’s in the exact right mindset to believe that this is his golden ticket. He believes in the strength of his passions, the same way he believed when he first met Rory and thought there was nothing large enough to stand in their way.

He rides out of town on the same wave he crashed in on, except this time all the emotions swirling around his stomach are overpowered by the burning desire to get her back. He has to get her back.

 

**x. We Have Lost Even**

 

_I remembered you with my soul clenched_

_in that sadness of mine that you know_

 

Maybe the old Rory would have gone with him, but not this Rory. This Rory is accompanied by Dean, yet another ghost from the past. This Rory is neither happy nor blank; she is _mad_ , goddamnit, and Jess sort of likes it. This Rory doesn’t care if she hurts him or not, and he supposes he deserves it.

Once again, he was remembering a different Rory as he made his impassioned pleas.

“Come with me.”

“What?”

“Come with me.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Away.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Probably! Do it, come with me! Don’t think about it!”

He thinks that maybe if he bombards her with this begging, if he gives her just a split second to decide, she’ll say yes. She’s always been a people-pleaser and if he has to exploit that part of her personality to get what he wants, then so be it.

“You’re ready and I’m ready. I’m ready for this! I know you couldn’t count on me before, but you _can_ now, you _can_!”

“No.”

“You know we’re supposed to be together. I knew it the first time I saw you two years ago, and you know it, too. I know you do.”

She just keeps repeating the word “no” and Jess is tempted to ask her if he should whack the top of her head to get the CD to stop skipping, but now is definitely not the time. So he goes for one more hail mary.

“Don’t say no just to make me stop talking or make me go away. Only say no if you really don’t wanna be with me.”

And she says no. And he leaves.

When he looks back on this moment in his life, he knows that he did it all wrong, every bit of it. Once again, he was looking at Rory through a lense of his own sadness, a sadness that she knew all too well, for it had been that same sadness that was their ruin.

That’s always been his problem. He can’t seem to let go of his past and it’s destroying him, piece by piece.

 

**xi. Almost Out Of The Sky**

 

_Girl who have come from so far, been brought from so far,_

_sometimes your glance flashes out under the sky._

_Rumbling, storm, cyclone of fury,_

_you cross above my heart without stopping_

 

He feels her, even though she’s not there, and he thinks that maybe that’s why he started writing it all down.

He has to get it out, you see, has to find a way to sleep at night without being haunted by every mistake he ever made. So he writes. He scribbles it all down into cheap spiral notebooks he buys at the drugstore on the corner and it makes him feel better. Makes him feel lighter. Makes him feel just the tiniest bit free.

At first, he saw his story as self-prescribed therapy, but as it takes shape under his ink-stained hands, he starts to think that maybe this is a way out.

She starts to fade from him. The memories that he used to drown in are now simple flashes; like a single bolt of lightning after months of weathering hurricanes. Her face, voice, smile, all appear and disappear in a split second, leaving Jess to wonder if the only reason he still thinks of her at all is pure muscle memory.

He knows it’s a good thing that she’s disappearing from view, but it also scares him because without her on the horizon, what is he working towards?

 

**xii. Your Breast Is Enough**

 

_You gather things to you like an old road._

_You are peopled with echoes and nostalgic voices._

 

With the memories of Rory Gilmore immigrating from his head to the blank pages in front of him, Jess had a little more time and inclination to study himself. A dangerous pastime, but when you’ve ruined every close relationship you’ve ever had, a little introspection is called for.

It all comes down to the past with him, the past he can’t let go of, no matter how hard he tries. But then again, is he _really_ trying all that hard?

He is sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park (not the one she found him on all those years ago) and reading _Empire Falls_ (Miles Roby is so much like Luke, Jess wonders if Richard Russo made a pitstop in Stars Hollow before writing his book) when a notion strikes him.

What if he’s holding onto the past because it’s all he has left?

He hates the melodrama of that phrase, but it rings true. His soul is overflowing with the people who have come and gone, the places he has seen, the words that have echoed through his head for far too long.

He collects pieces of the past to prove that, even though he is alone and wandering right now, he once had a mom and a rotating cast of her boyfriends and a shitty apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. He had an uncle and a girlfriend and a home full of baseball memorabilia, books, and the smell of french fries. He had a dad and a Sasha-and-Lily and a house with entirely too many dogs in the front yard.

So maybe all that time spent mourning the loss of those things was unfounded because he’s quickly realizing that they’re all still rattling around inside his brain.

He remembers screaming, “I have nothing!” to Jimmy on a warm summer night on the boardwalk and at the time, it was the only true thing he knew, but now he’s not so sure.

Now, he has a pen and paper and a story to tell and all the ghosts he has collected are gonna help him write his way out. He’s gonna write his way out if it’s the last goddamn thing he does.

 

**xiii. I Have Gone Marking**

 

_Stories to tell you on the shore of the evening,_

_sad and gentle doll, so that you should not be sad_

 

She’s not at Yale and he doesn’t know why, but he plans on finding out.

It started out innocently enough. Well, that’s what he’s telling himself, but no one would ever label Jess “innocent.”

The guys at Truncheon wanted him to do a grassroots campaign and take his brooding rebel act out on the road - Kerouac reference only a tiny bit intended. He made plans to stop in Jersey, New York City, Hartford, and Boston, but the rest of the trip would be on the fly, stopping at any independent bookstores he might come across on his travels.

The Hartford stop was necessary because he had to stop at least once in Connecticut and because he had to talk to Rory. Dangerous, but he had to let her know what she had done for him, regardless of the pain it might bring.

He never thought that she would be shouldering an equal burden.

She’s at her grandparents’ house and she mutters something about taking time off from school, but Jess knows there’s more to the story. There always is.

So he gives her the book because he has to and he gives her the book because maybe it will fight off that sadness in her china-doll eyes. Stories have always been the way they both fought off the darkness, so maybe this story, their story, will light things up enough to show her the way out of the hole she’s fallen into.

He’s always been the court jester to her princess, the fool who would cartwheel until he didn’t know which way was up, just to see her smile.

He hopes that this story contains just enough magic to put her back together again.

 

**xiv. Every Day You Play**

 

_How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,_

_my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running_

 

The next night, he meets the boyfriend. Logan Huntzberger, a name that belongs to some Austrian duke or the heir to a schnitzel fortune.

Logan is the quintessential rich guy, the one who keeps a close eye on “his girl” while he eyes every woman in the building. Jess wonders if Rory notices.

But, if he’s being honest, Jess can also see the attraction. A guy who can snap his fingers and proccure anything you desire, a guy who can make conversation with a brick wall, a guy who welcomes the company of any and all, so long as they laugh at his jokes and take the teasing with a pained smile on their face.

And if this is what Rory wanted all along, then, God, she must have been in hell with him, because even coked up out of his mind, Jess could never muster up the manic energy that Logan is practically vibrating with.

Jess was held in universal contempt by the entire town of Stars Hollow; a month there and they were already having meetings about how to run him out.

He was difficult, and still is, and it’s something he works on, but it’s also something he challenges people with. _If you want to get close, be prepared to prick your finger on my thorns_. Compared to Dean’s folksy, “aw shucks” mannerisms and Logan’s smooth, studied courtesy, Jess was practically feral.

And above all, he is a loner. Rory liked to pretend that she was, too, but she loved the fond smiles of adoration, the murmured praises of her greatness, the looks of approval she was met with at every corner far too much. She couldn’t take the solitary life that Jess had needed back then.

So he watches Logan twist himself into knots trying to trivialize the thing that Jess is most proud of, watches him spit out authors’ names like they had personally offended him, and he doesn’t say a word. Well, he gets in one good shot, but Rory cancels it out by immediately admonishing him, causing him to feel like a chastened schoolboy.

He leaves her again, but this time, finally, he is in the right. This time, he is not the monster she was forced to coexist alongside in the pursuit of love.

This time, _she_ has to live with the guilt of having done the wrong thing.

 

**xv. I Like For You To Be Still**

 

_Let me come to be still in your silence_

 

He dreams about her sometimes, which somehow doesn’t seem fair.

In his dreams, she isn’t the Rory that belonged to him, which he supposes is a step in the right direction - he’s no longer remembering her as she was, but as she is now.

In his dreams, she smiles the way she used to before they started dating, like everything between them is a beautiful, wonderful secret.

In his dreams, everything between them has been forgiven and forgotten and they can move forward, unanchored by their pasts.

In his dreams, he has stopped running.

In his dreams, they are cloaked in loving silence again.

In his dreams, he sees a future that breaks his heart as soon as he opens his eyes.

 

**xvi. In My Sky At Twilight**

 

_and in your life my infinite dreams live_

 

He sends her a shiny purple flyer and he doesn’t know whether to pray that she shows or pray that she doesn’t.

He doesn’t picture her as often (or as obsessively) as he used to, but when he does, he pictures her with a life that sort of mirrors his own, in the loosest way possible.

Both of them writing things they were proud of, both of them surrounded by a small group of friends that support them in any and all endeavors, both of them reading books that made them smile and think and grow.

Both of them single. Come on, a guy can dream.

He doesn’t really know anything about her life now, so he stocks his thoughts of her with dreams that she had shared with him when they were kids, dreams she had whispered to him during car rides and on couches and over counters and coffee.

He gives this daydream Rory everything she ever wanted and more because he can’t see a scenario where she doesn’t end up with these infinite dreams.

 

**xvii. Thinking, Tangling Shadows**

 

_Your presence is foreign, as strange to me as a thing._

 

When she appears in the doorway, Jess thinks he might be dreaming, mainly because she looks like the old Rory. Her bangs are pinned back and she’s wearing sneakers with her jeans and he wonders if she did it on purpose, if she knows that this is the version of her he will always feel a strange sense of ownership over.

They smile awkward greetings at each other, make stilted conversation about Truncheon, and then fall back on what they know: books. He shows her around, tells her about the authors and manuscripts and it all feels….strange.

Strange to have her in front of him, dressed like not a day has passed since he stole that first book from her.

Strange to have her smiling at him, even after everything that has happened between them.

Strange to have her taking up space here in Philadelphia, a place that he chose partly because it was one of the few places he had been to where he couldn’t picture her as clearly.

Strange, yes, but so completely welcome.

 

**xviii. Here I Love You**

 

_I love what I do not have. You are so far._

 

He can’t believe she came all this way just to tell him that he was a pawn in another one of her games, the games she always pretended she wasn’t playing.

“I love him,” she shrugs and Jess wants to throw something but he won’t, not yet, not until she’s at least a block away.

He thought that he was maybe, just a little bit, over her, but he’s not. How could he have thought he was?

He had fooled himself into believing that just because her bangs are swept out of the way, she was back to normal. He should have known: just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not still there.

He thought she was closer but it turns out she’s farther away than ever and he can’t do anything about it because she’s in love and he knows what that feels like. He knows how powerless you are before the person you love.

He hates this, but what is he supposed to do? She’s nowhere near his orbit and he was a fool to think that she was finally back within his reach.

 

**xix. Girl Lithe and Tawny**

 

_My sombre heart searches for you, nevertheless_

 

He searches for her everywhere, in every city he hits for his book tour, every country he runs off to for a few weeks every couple months, every kind face he comes across.

He is not the angry kid he once was, nor is he the calm, even-keeled adult he masquerades as on his better days.

He is a little of both, but overshadowed by a somberness that bleeds into everything he does. Women think he’s dark and mysterious, which he does play up from time to time, but they soon find out it’s just an aching, overreaching sadness.

He hates himself for letting her waltz back through his life, tossing hand grenades like flower petals, and then skipping away, arm in arm with the boyfriend, while Jess takes cover as everything explodes.

He hates himself for looking for her when she stopped searching him out as soon as he could no longer offer her a shoulder to cry on and an unshakable faith that she was flawless.

She has someone else for that now.

 

**xx. Tonight I Can Write**

 

_Tonight I can write the saddest lines._

_I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too._

 

He starts writing again because, when the world starts falling down around his ears, it’s the only thing that makes sense.

 _The Subsect_ featured Rory, but it wasn’t about her, not really. What he’s writing now, though, is completely and totally about her, about how she makes a wreck and ruin of his life and he lets her every time. He recognizes that he’s an accomplice in the crimes against him, which makes it all the more difficult to relive through writing.

He swathes both their characters in disguises, different names, different lives, but the heartbreak remains. The running away remains. The mind games remain.

He knows she will get her hands on a copy somehow (hell, he might even send her one) and he can picture exactly the pained look that will flash in her eyes when she realizes he has finally painted her as she is and not the way he thought she was.

It might be wishful thinking on his part, but he thinks that she might cry when she reads the last line.

_I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too._

That line summed up the curse that had been brought down upon him ever since she had turned those blue eyes his way.

He hopes it breaks her heart, just a little bit.

 

**The Song of Despair**

 

_Oh the mad coupling of hope and force_

_in which we merged and despaired_

 

He looks back on it all now and wonders how he could have lived in such a fever dream for so many years.

He is 32 now and he still lives alone. It’s fine, it’s what he wants, and none of his friends worry about it anymore, which is nice.

He sees her more often than he needs to, but less often than he expected, seeing as how Luke and Lorelai are married in everyone’s eyes but the law and the church.

Their latest tête-à-tête takes place in the local newspaper office. She spends the entire conversation bemoaning her lack of underwear and direction in life. He suppresses the urge to say “Now you see how it feels. Not so easy to blame all my adolescent problems on my attitude now, is it?”

He looks at her with a kindly pity in his eyes that she either ignores or can't see at all; Jess can't tell which.

He wonders why they both tried so hard to make it work, why they forced the oval pegs into round holes (because it wasn’t so wrong that they were square pegs; just slightly wrong), why he spent so long romanticizing a relationship that was over before it even started.

It had all hinged on the blind hope and faith they had in each other. Growing up, they could see each other for what they were and not conflate the image with the anger and sadness of the past.

It sort of made him sad.

Who would have thought he’d ever fall out of love with the woman he’d spent his life writing about?


End file.
